Fish that get along with oscars and will also eat little nematodes or detritus worms

[missypooh93]

Please let me know if you have any suggestions :^)

I have an Oscar fish and lots of squiggly white s shape worms that like to latch onto him/her. I'm going to move my oscar to the bigger tank before adding any new fish, but i eventually will want all the fish in the same tank.

 

[trash.binh91]

How big are your tanks, and what fish do you have?

 

[Colin_T]

can you post a picture of the fish with the worms on it?

There are several white worms that live in aquariums. Most are harmless and only build up in numbers when there is lots of rotting organic matter in the tank, (left over fish food and fish waste). Big (75%) water changes and complete gravel cleans help keep these things under control, and regularly cleaning the filter helps too.

If the fish has anchor worm then they need to be treated. A picture will help us identify what is going on.

At this stage I would suggest doing a 75% water change and gravel clean the substrate each day for a week and post a pic and see what happens.

 

[missypooh93]

Definitely not anchor worm. It is detritus nematode type worm. Thank you for being so helpful, Colin! I am going to move him to the bigger tank soon and buy some emerald cory catfish to eat up the detritus in the wormy tank

 

[seangee]

Please note that corys do not eat detritus. They eat food And produce more detritus. So if you don't like the worms that will only make it worse. Colin is right. Clean the substrate and reduce feeding.

 

[DeniseTed]

Definitely not anchor worm. It is detritus nematode type worm. Thank you for being so helpful, Colin! I am going to move him to the bigger tank soon and buy some emerald cory catfish to eat up the detritus in the wormy tank

I found that snails help cleaning extra food etc. a lot especially Malaysian Trumpet Snails and Ram Snails. I have them in abundance. The tanks where I have MTSnails don't even have a mulm buildup to vacuum anymore. I also don't have algae on my glass to clean anymore. Both types of snails clean all my plant leaves as well. My favorite snail is my JapaneseTrapdoor Snail. It grows about as large as a medium sized mystery snail, has one live baby at a time and not many of them. The baby grows slowly as well. They're a lovely shape and my 2 mature snails have a beautiful blue-green patina on part of their shells. They don;t do the huge amount of cleaning like the MTSnails or Rams but are worth having.
I have a bunch of floating plants in my tanks as well. I have noticed a few detritus worms there sometimes when I disturb a mass of plants. The worms are eating dead foliage and extra fish food. Only once I had a tank full of them and that was from over feeding before I got the MTSnails.. I was told to not feed for a few days and clean tank w/water changes. That worked well. If you see a bunch of detritus worms swimming around it's time to pull back on the food and water change
Also, I think certain catfish with boney type plating on their backs do okay with oscars and cychlids. I'd try to keep their sizes similar and the catfish good safe hiding places so they don't stress.